Sorry. But no. I just didn’t buy that.
Any of it.
Firstly, and most annoyingly,
Daenerys. Look. We know that her father was “The Mad King”. We know that he turned from benevolent ruler to homicidal despot, and threatened to burn his own people alive. We know that, for the sake of the common good (as well as the Lannisters’ good), Jaime had to assassinate him.
But Daenerys, turning out to be even worse than her father? No. The writers simply haven’t earned the right to do that.
They just didn’t do enough groundwork. In the previous seven seasons, they had sporadically shown how ruthless Daenerys could be in her thirst for both power and vengeance.
But never did they do enough to make it believable that, in The Bells, she would torch innocent, unarmed families by the thousand, long after their city had surrendered.
We were given no reason why she would reduce an entire capital to a smouldering barbecue of blackened flesh. No reason why she would think Cersei’s beheading of
Missandei must be avenged by massacring blameless women and children. No reason why, having obliterated the Iron Fleet, she wouldn’t just fly straight to The Red Keep, kill Cersei, and end the battle there and then, without further loss of life.
No reason, other than “Out of the blue she’s gone totally tonto. Look at her mad eyes! Look at her mad hair! She isn’t even bothering to do her make-up any more!”
I made the contrast with Breaking Bad in my review of The Last of the Starks, and it’s worth making again. We believe Walter White could turn from timorous chemistry teacher to monstrous ganglord, because the writers guided us through that transformation, step by tiny step: they made it incremental, natural, logical.
With Daenerys, however, the writers of Game of Thrones did nothing of the kind. In effect, they just shrugged, and asked us to believe that the great crusading heroine of the seven previous seasons, the golden messiah, the people’s princess, the ultimate Social Justice Warrior, had had a funny turn and gone full Genghis Khan.
It was bizarre. And so badly handled. In the end, it wasn’t Varys who betrayed Daenerys. It was the writers. Abruptly, and without clear justification, they’ve taken against their favourite daughter, and plotted to turn us against her, too. They’ve given her terrible dialogue. They’ve shown key characters carping about her behind her back. They’ve shown her aides muttering about her mental state, and her fitness to rule. Somehow, in short, they’ve turned Westeros into an American high school, with everyone bitching bitterly about the new girl, who’s just too pretty for her own damn good. Who
does she think she is?
